Monday, December 24, 2007

A Christmas Eve Fish Tale


It's the day before Christmas and after weeks of neglect, I finally cleaned out the fish tank. I couldn't stand it anymore and felt sorry for the poor fishy. When I open up the lid and started pouring out the brown-tinged water...Phew!!!! What a stench!! It was so bad I had to turn my head away. To think this is what fish do, swim in their own excrements and bile. Then I thought, wait a minute, that isn't so different than us - except we call it "pollution." It's all the more amazing, then, that the Son of God would enter our world, full of human excrement and bile, in the form of sin, overconsumption, neglect, and inhumanity. Yet he came to us to redeem our world from the inside out, one person at a time, then the whole earth, out of his mercy for us. I didn't shoot a "before" picture of the tank, I suppose, because I was ashamed of what it had become. Yet Jesus was not so ashamed of us or what our world has become to prevent himself from entering into our filth in order to make us clean through his own identification with stinky humanity. Is it any surprise that a holy God would choose to be born in a barn, surrounded by the stench of the world in order to save it? Praise be to God!


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